Explore the Collections

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

Paul Strand's 1915 photograph of Wall Street workers passing in front of the monolithic Morgan Trust Company can be seen as the quintessential representation of the uneasy relationship between early twentieth-century Americans and their new cities. Here the people are seen not as individuals but as abstract silhouettes trailing long shadows down the chasms of commerce. The intuitive empathy that Strand demonstrates for these workers of New York's financial district would be evident throughout the wide and varied career of this seminal American photographer and filmmaker, who increasingly became involved with the hardships of working people around the world. In this and his other early photographs of New York, Strand helped set a trend toward pure photography of subject and away from the pictorialist" imitation of painting. Wall Street is one of only two known vintage platinum prints of this image and one of the treasures of some five hundred photographs in the Museum's Paul Strand Retrospective Collection. Martha Chahroudi, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 230.